d Roman, bond and free, are alike under
His all-seeing Providence.[Footnote: "De Benef.," iii. 18: "Virtus omnes
admittit, libertinos, servos, reges." These and many other passages
are collected by Champagny, ii. 546, after Fabricius and others, and
compared with well-known texts of Scripture. The version of the Vulgate
shows a great deal of verbal correspondence. M. Troplong remarks, after
De Maistre, that Seneca has written a fine book on Providence, for which
there was not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero.--"L'Influence
du Christianisme," &c., i., ch. 4.]

"St. Paul enjoined submission and obedience even to the tyranny of
Nero, and Seneca fosters no ideas subversive of political subjection.
Endurance is the paramount virtue of the Stoic. To forms of government
the wise man was wholly indifferent; they were among the
external circumstances above which his spirit soared in serene
self-contemplation. We trace in Seneca no yearning for a restoration
of political freedom, nor does he even point to the senate, after
the manner of the patriots of the day, as a legitimate check to the
autocracy of the despot. The only mode, in his view, of tempering
tyranny is to educate the tyrant himself in virtue. His was the
self-denial of the Christians, but without their anticipated
compensation. It seems impossible to doubt that in his highest flights
of rhetoric--and no man ever recommended the unattainable with a finer
grace--Seneca must have felt that he was labouring to build up a house
without foundations; that his system, as Caius said of his style, was
sand without lime. He was surely not unconscious of the inconsistency of
his own position, as a public man and a minister, with the theories to
which he had wedded himself; and of the impossibility of preserving in
it the purity of his character as a philosopher or a man. He was aware
that in the existing state of society at Rome, wealth was necessary to
men high in station; wealth alone could retain influence, and a poor
minister became at once contemptible. The distributor of the Imperial
favours must have his banquets, his receptions, his slaves and freedmen;
he must possess the means of attracting if not of bribing; he must not
seem too virtuous, too austere, among an evil generation; in order to do
good at all he must swim with the stream, however polluted it might be.
All this inconsistency Seneca must have contemplated without blenching;
and there is something tou